Schrodinger's cat, the media and spin

"Schrodinger's cat" is a famous mind problem from Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum physics, as reported in a WSJ column last week. It occurred to me that information "spin" acts the same way. Or maybe I should be on the other side of the coin and say that it is about Truth or Reality. It's all very postmodern, and it gives me the shivers.

Here we go. The story is that there is a cat in a box with a vial of cyanide and a radioactive atom. As explained in the WSJ, if the atom decays, the emitted radiation particles smash the vial, releasing the cyanide and killing the cat.

Now, let's say the atom has a 50-50 chance of decaying by noon. When you open the box at noon, is the cat alive or dead?

You may think the simple answer is that it's a coin toss, but quantum physics says it's more complicated than that. QP says that at noon, right before you open the box, the cat is in BOTH states, that it is BOTH alive and dead. Only when you look does one state emerge. This is how atoms work, but recent studies have found that the weirdness of quantum physics continues to work in larger and larger settings, thus impacting (if we are willing to really think about it) the very nature of reality.

What does this have to do with the media and spin?

While thinking about the cat in the box, it struck me that stories in the media work almost the same way. Written objectively, some stories can be read one way or another, depending on the preconceived notions the reader has. To simplify it, let's say a story quotes some numbers ("lies, damn lies, and statistics") and those numbers can either support or not support a certain position.

Before the story is read, it exists in the either/or world of neither truth nor spin -- in fact it is both. Then, read by a proponent or supporter, the story settles into one state and contains truth. But when a non-supporter reads the same story it becomes something else: spin. Same story, different realities. Not different readings, different realities.

It's no wonder those godawful media pundits are yelling at each other all the time.

I may edit this after I think about it some more.